Preface
“Miracles are not contrary to nature but only contrary to what we know about nature.”
The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.
Understanding why people hold such radically different perspectives about miracles is much easier than explaining what those differences are and why people hold them as tightly as they do. But we will try to do so in what follows.
To begin with, these two views are not mere categories but exist at opposite ends of a spectrum of perspective. At one end of the spectrum are those
who simply "believe" a miracle comes from a supernatural agent, called
either God or the devil, and mostly because
doing so evokes an emotional response that feels undeniably real.
At the other end of that spectrum is a way of looking at the world that
is willing to let go of the comfort and security that comes from a belief in such supernatural agents in exchange for a chance to obtain a deeper
understanding about both the nature of reality and ourselves. More simply, it is a difference between being okay with uncertainty and not being okay with it.
As St. Augustine himself alluded to, we are left to wonder if one
view is more right than the other, and whether both are really as mutually exclusive as we "believe," or are these two perspectives just
different ways of looking at the same thing; one personifying the
unknown into a reflection of themselves, either their virtues or vices, and the other seeing merely a
reflection of their own limitations and the gaping maw of the unknown? Ironically, Augustine's claim that miracles were not contrary to nature was as heretical as the ideas of Baruch Spinoza and Giordano Bruno, two men who would late become victims of the very torture and imprisonment Augustine advocated as necessary for curing errors of divine revelation as purgatory and hell.
To
venture into the questions posed by the many different interpretations
of what a "miracle" is first requires us to be aware of certain questions
along the journey. What a
person must ask themself before any attempt to understand the different
perspectives we have of miracles, as such, is what is more important to
themself as individuals, and what should be more important to us as members of a
complex species: defending traditional beliefs or evolving toward a
deeper more nuanced understanding of what it true, at least to the
degree that we are able to know truth, especially the truth about our
perceptions and ourselves? And if a conflict is found to exist between
these
two, which are we willing to sacrifice in order to follow in the
footsteps of the other? Which perspective, in other words, is not only
healthier for helping to foster understandings of differences, but
therefore comes with a greater moral obligation to follow in the name of
love for each other rather than love for a brand of a God?
Nor is it simply a question of
whether there is only one way of looking at miracles, or even "God. "
Rather, while a "belief" seeks to claim there is only one way to look at what
we can call "a miracle," any attempt to understand anything
requires the intellectual honesty to admit that anything and everything
is always subject to multiple interpretations. The former is
as narrowly focused as a soldier trapped behind enemy lines, whose
tunnel vision is necessarily sharpened by the terror of being caught and tortured,
while the latter is as curious as a new born child, who is born fully
without fear and fascinated by everything they survey. Indeed, how much
is it like a wild animal to see the world through the eyes of the
former, and what else could it mean to be "born again" then to see the
world through the eyes of the latter?
What follows is a journey through the awareness we have achieved today, which has allowed our intelligence and knowledge of the world and ourselves to crawl from the primordial slim of superstition which underwrites all our ideas. Every advance our species has made forward toward a higher understanding of anything has required the slow painstaking processes of shedding the dead skin of tradition in order to be led by the light of understanding to a higher truth. For as Nietzsche observed, a mind that is unable to change its opinion in response to new information ceases to be a mind. Rather, it becomes a robot or a zombie, controlled like a puppet on the strings of a tradition by the dead hands of a buried yet venerated past.
To free ourselves from the bondage of beliefs which, for some, are literally as old as the dinosaurs, therefore requires keeping the questions posed above in mind. For only by doing so can what follows shed any light on why people have such radically different perspectives about miracles. And only by understanding those differences can we determine which seem more probable, and evolve to a higher understanding about ourselves and the universe we inhabit, the same way we did about geocentrism, slavery, witches, racism, and much else.
That being said, even if we choose to decide that miracles comes from a God, no need could be greater for our survival as a species than trying to understanding why others see something so radically different than we do. As such, while what follows is obviously from the perspective of an atheist, and is presented as an argument, it at the very least is an attempt to explain to "believers" why the very same "hand of God" we rely on for our economics is the one the atheist is relying on to show that miracles, far from being merely supernatural acts outside of nature, are merely "contrary to what we know about nature." And those who claim otherwise appear to be acting less on a faith in God, and more out of a faith in their own infallibility, about both nature and their own mind.
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